


She's Lost Control Again

by VoteForNuke



Series: 2020 MGS Summer Games [6]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: F/F, Gen, Implied Relationships, Introspection, NASA era, The Boss-centric, implied strangeboss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26113048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoteForNuke/pseuds/VoteForNuke
Summary: On a cold night in Florida, The Boss thinks of her sons.
Series: 2020 MGS Summer Games [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884223
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	She's Lost Control Again

**Author's Note:**

> Aided by 'She's Lost Control Again' by Joy Division

There was a strange comfort in the dark of her supplied room. The silence, the still, the long shadows drawn over vague shapes; it was a stark contrast to her days under buzzing lights. Going snowblind among white walls and white desks, reading white papers with nervous white jackets milling about. Overexposed like an operating room. Maybe that’s why she opened so easily tonight in front of Strangelove, surrendering to the impending autopsy. If this flight ended her life, they’d pick her bones clean, but there would be no trace of her mind, her thoughts.

Hanging her jacket on the hook, she stepped into the bathroom. She ignored the light switch in favor of turning on the shower. The dark was soothing, like an extra layer of privacy. Heaven knew how she longed for privacy. The poking, the prodding, the imaging and tests and training and evaluations–- 

The once deliberate motion of her hands paused. Pale streetlight drifted down from the sliver of a window above the mirror, washing her in a ghostly white. Inky shadows mixed and bled, formless and soft around the edges. The hollows of her eyes were skull-like, stark lines drawn around her mouth, down the column of her throat to the dip of her collar bones to...it. The scar. It wound over the jut of a chest bone, then across the curve of her breast, then wandered down the dip of her ribcage, disappearing under her hands frozen on the buttons of her shirt. 

How old was Jack now? Twenty-five? What was his rank, how had his career progressed in her absence? Who was he working for? Marines? CIA, FBI? Was he drinking coffee at Langley or awaiting orders off the coast of Cuba? Too many questions. She had left him suddenly, but not ill-equipped. Jack was a true soldier, strong and capable. He’d grow into something great, if the powers at play would let him. 

If they didn’t waste him. 

Absently, she traced a finger over the scar. It didn’t respond to the touch, the nerves severed and long dead. The numbness spread through her torso, stretching up to her neck. The body could only take so much damage, she supposed. All those miraculous recoveries, she had to lose something. Oh, but how the tender little nerves would reunite in the night, how they would itch and burn like the scar was still open and bleeding. Not a phantom pain, but muscle memory. The body returning to a place the mind never left. Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither left, maybe the mind and body clung to each other through trauma. 

She let the shirt fall to the floor. 

Soldiers were a lot like horses. Everyone sought the fine ones, the well-bred with splendid confirmation and mild manners. Straight backs, good teeth, steady feet. They had to be perfect, perfect for the ruining. Soring, shank bits, break the soul and not the habits. That prized horse would turn swaybacked and lame, then be shooed away to the glue factory. A shame, such a shame; pick another one from the herd. 

Jack was a capable young man. He had a lot to learn, but he was far from wet behind the ears. Though, he certainly looked it. Wide blue eyes, a touch of baby fat still clinging to his cheeks, it made his often stern expression seem so childish. A boy playing at war. She had always loved his eyes. Such a beautiful blue, and they were fixed with such a...clarity. So clear and level despite how they were unguarded, like a child’s. Searching and curious, it had always touched her how he watched her with such focus. A focus she was sure her father saw, when he taught her the basics of horsemanship. 

She pulled the tie from her hair, almost surprised when the locks brushed against her bare shoulders. Just a tickle, like a ghost placing his hand there. She’d cut it after showering. The water was hot on her skin, enough to bring out an immediate flush on the dead stretches of skin. 

Jack came to her mind often. Daily. Sometimes hourly. She missed him in a way that words could never express. An ache that came from the very beat of her heart. An ache that had a name she didn’t know, one she didn’t give him. 

He was 14 now. He liked cowboy movies and math. 

The pictures the Philosophers would send used to come monthly, tracking the progress of her growing boy. Incentive and reward. Watching him grow hair and teeth, learn to hold his cups and crawl, then pull himself up on furniture and stand freely. One of her favorites. His beaming smile, like he was so proud of himself. Then they grew less frequent, every other month, every two months, twice a year. Now it was only once a year. They each had something written on the back, a sentence or two about who he was. He is 8 now and draws pictures for fun. He is 10 and reads classical literature on his own. 

He was her son. The child she woke from a coma for, the child she bore in combat, the child she nursed despite how it pulled at the stitches. The child she wept for when he was taken. Her boy, a stranger she only knew from pictures and stagnant sentences. 

In the last one, when he was 13, he had been dressed in something Russian and traditional. His gaze at the camera was distracted, hair shaggy and golden. There were shapes of other children around him, long tunics that were red and white. On the back it said, ‘he loves dancing and classical music’. What a smart young boy. What classical music? What dances? 

With the most recent one, he was dressed in a proper school uniform, posed and groomed, his cherub face fixed in a lethal glare. She often searched for traces of the Sorrow in him. The line of his nose, the curve of his jaw, the shape of his cheeks, the angle of his brows, his narrow eyes. She could only find herself in it all. Even his grim expression brought back memories of her own photos. 

A fair young girl, her shoulders square with the weight of the world. Brow set, mouth always a serious line, never one to pose or flash a grin. He even liked cowboy movies. It had made her pause, reflect on pulling the other prim and proper society kids into a game of cowboys and indians. Of riding lessons when she imagined herself streaking across a sunburnt desert, of shooting lessons when she pictured herself chasing bandits and getting off hip shots. She wondered if he had the same daydreams. Maybe not. He was almost 15, she had already put aside ‘childish’ things long before that. 

It was Jack that had brought that shine back to her life. His strange innocence, his vibrance for life. Jack liked music and dancing, but he liked that radio rock and roll and he danced the Bunny Hop and the Jitterbug and he Boogie Woogie’d. He liked to slick back his hair and flash his uniform to the girls, though he had a bad habit of getting too attached to other men. Attached like she was to Strangelove. Or, perhaps, the other way around. It was a bad habit, either way. People tolerated what was between herself and Strangelove, either because they weren’t threatened by it or they couldn’t afford to lose them on this project. Jack might not be so lucky. There were plenty of soldiers that hadn’t been. 

She had trained it out of him, she was certain. He still flirted with women and would badger men to wrestle, but it never went further than that. Before she had left, he had actually been complaining about a double-date he’d been pulled into. Good. Jack wouldn’t be mature enough for a relationship. He would let it sway him, lose sight of who he truly was. Call it women’s intuition, call it a mother’s instinct, call it a soldier’s gut; whatever it was, she knew it wouldn’t end well. It might end as well as she and Stangelove...

Stepping out of the shower, her tired mind finally fell to silence. She allowed herself the thoughts she had been pushing away for weeks. She’d allowed herself to speak of something she had never before. Maybe now she could regain control, find her center and focus on the mission. 

In the still, she trimmed her hair over the sink. Streetlight turned to that pale break of dawn, the first day of April. Laying down to catch a few hours of sleep, she wondered if Jack liked his present from Santa. She wondered if her other son got any presents at all.


End file.
